President Obama had a lot of lofty goals in his State of the Union speech earlier this year. He declared it would be a ‘year of action’ - meaning if Congress didn’t get things done, he would. Yet, seven months later, he doesn’t have much to justify his ambitious rhetoric.
Minimum Wage
Obama had hopes to raise the minimum wage to $10.10/hour for federal contract workers.
January 2014: “Say yes! Give America a raise!” (accompanied by a standing ovation.)
July 2014: “But despite his renewed calls for lawmakers to broaden pay talks, the federal minimum wage has remained untouched, at $7.25 per hour,” the Washington Post writes.
Immigration
Everyone knows we have a border crisis. President Obama had what he thought would be a surefire approach to overhauling the broken system. “The President’s plan builds a smart, effective immigration system that continues efforts to secure our borders and cracks down on employers who hire undocumented immigrants,” declared whitehouse.gov. Yet, once again, this part of his SOTU speech proved to be chock-full of empty promises.
January 2014: “Let’s get immigration reform done this year!”
July 2014: “There is a larger issue I realize that involves a lot of politics, which is ‘why aren’t we passing comprehensive immigration reform?’ which would put an additional 20,000 border patrol agents and give us a lot of additional authority to deal with some of these problems, and that should have done a year ago. It should have been done two years ago. It’s gotten caught up in politics.”
Gridlock
January 2014: “As president I’m committed to making Washington work better.”
July 2014: House Republicans are suing the president for his overreach of power.
Can the president check anything off his list? I’ll show some mercy and not include his long forgotten health care goals.
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